Chris Barbin has released another blog post, explaining that Appirio is now backed by Sequoia Capital. Pretty neat, huh? This is a serious company with some seriously good research, apparently. So their backing of Appirio means that Appirio is in some really good company. Appirio’s website lists Jim Goetz of Sequoia Capital on its Board of Directors and writes that “Appirio is privately held, with funding from Sequoia Capital, salesforce.com, and a select group of angel investors.” Congratulations, Appirio, on securing some high quality (and, I hope, high value) funding. I know that this will cement your place amongst the top product companies in the sfdcverse, and will enable you to vault to the top in the pure-implementation rankings as well.

Google just released its Google Data APIs Java Client Eclipse Plug-in, which seems to have great possibilities for developing in Google. Combined with the Force.com Toolkit for Google Data APIs, it could go even further.

Chris Barbin, CEO of Appirio, recently wrote a superb article on Microsoft’s pathetic attempt at trying to appear that it was entering the SaaS market with it’s Dynamics CRM package. … Note Chris’s choice of an example of a company that (unwisely, apparently as far as Chris thinks) uses Microsoft’s veiled on-premise solution: Astadia Consulting … Does this signal some bad blood?